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Some of us are just getting there before others :)
The real issue is that the blogosphere loves to get self-righteous and indignant because it drives page views.
Twitter's essentially a chat room - why not re-post rumor and let the listeners either confirm/reject/or point you in another direction - which may eventually lead to discovery of the real story (or non-story as the case may be). To hold it to the same standards as traditional journalism is silly and would make Twitter a much more boring and less useful place.
Just wanted to second Adam's comment that - in my opinion - you did nothing wrong. Had you posted just your first twitter update to your blog with a note that it was cross posted to your Globe and Mail blog I may have expected this response from you.
Not everyone has to be more careful, but paradoxically we (journalists) hold journalists like yourself - and ourselves - to a higher standard. So you and we have to be more careful before bouncing on stuff like this. Come on, it's the modern form of a chain letter. It's a lousy start to your day, but sometimes you get days like that. Oh well.
best,
banane's point about our propensity to believe that what we see in traditional media is fact is a good one. This is not always the case, not on purpose but it happens. People need to decide for themselves how they will take in any information.
In the end, I don't think that your Twitter message was at all misleading or bad. It's something you saw, found interesting and shared - thanks.
Twitter is going to become a channel for rumours whether we like it or not and there are going to be a lot of journalists tracking what people say on Twitter and then following it up. OK, so you generally follow people you trust on Twitter but even so just assuming everything on there is going to be the truth is a pretty dangerous path.
I'd say texting something into Twitter in a way that makes it perfectly clear that it is unverified, is an acceptable way of bringing something to your community's attention. There are patterns of rumours and I guess the Steve Jobs one is becoming fairly recognisable, so it might have crossed your mind that this was untrue, but that's more one for your analytical blog post, not your spontaneous expression of surprise.
If you get a whole lot of people saying you're wrong, at least you'll stand corrected (and the likelihood is your mistake will be obvious far quicker than most news sources) but I don't really see that you should be criticised quite so much as a journalist for it, unless your Twitter channel said "This is a news feed. Everything here has been carefully crafted by a professional reporter".
I think the division between journalists and non-journalists is a false one. As I've argued on a number of occasions, peel away the job title and the paycheck, and what you're left with isn't a role, as such, but a process: the process of building contacts, gathering sources, researching the story, and so on.
So, while it wasn't a "traditional journalist" that debunked the rumour, it was someone using the journalistic process - simply by the tried and trusted method of picking up the phone, and calling someone in full possession of the facts.
The truth of "citizen journalism" is that anyone can *be* a journalist, simply by *doing* journalism. When re-twitttering a rumour, you weren't doing journalism - that doesn't make you any poorer as a journalist, though, because I think you were pretty clear that you weren't putting up a story :)
I've read (and posted) the craziest things on Twitter and I was just assuming that most people use judgment when following the flow of conversation, checking out original sources and conducting an irony check when something is over the line. Unless you're proclaiming that what you tweet is a journalistic effort, I don't see why you have to follow the tenets of the profession on Twitter.
Best comment that I've read around this event. Wikipedia taught us that quick edits and iteration create fairly accurate content. We don't judge the initial article (now called a stub) to Britannica, but after it goes through the process we generally trust its quality.
To be fair, I have no idea who Kara is or what her tweets to you were about as I don't follow her on Twitter. My tweet was a direct response to your asking for feedback after the fact and my sharing my opinion. To conflate the two makes it seem as if I was piling on vs. answering something I thought you wanted to get opinions on.
Tamera
the impression you were piling on. I was really just trying to give an
idea of the range of responses I got -- all of which I thought were
totally fair comment, by the way.
I'm just glad I followed that retweep up with a comforting message to my Apple and iPhone buddies encouraging them to take a deep breath ... that everything would be fine. I wouldn't want any heart attacks (no pun intended) on my conscience.
We all know how sensitive those Apple fans can be. ;)
Always a pleasure to read you, Mr Ingram.
This kind of makes me think of this session I just attended given by Etan Horowitz on “Twitter in Journalism.” When journalists delve into new media, there just aren't any hard lines yet about what's OK and what's not. They're making the rules up as they go along. :)
I don't expect every blog post or tweet to be true... but it does seem to be a good indicator of news items that tend to get updated pretty quickly if they turn out to be inaccurate.